127.1 - Revelations of NSA spying: June

Revelations of NSA spying: June

This entire show will be devoted to one topic: Spying by the National Security Agency, the NSA. I said recently that I hadn’t talked much about it because it was so much in the news I figured you were familiar with it - but it occurred to me that with so much having some out, it might be useful to go back over that ground to give a true sense of just how massive this really is.

So what I’m going to do is go through a roughly chronological account of what we have learned since these revelations began.

It started in June, when we learned that the National Security Agency, the NSA, is collecting information about the telephone calls made by tens of millions of Americans on an "ongoing, daily basis" and that the information is being gathered indiscriminately and in bulk - regardless of whether the people affected are suspected of any wrongdoing. This had been reported before but what got the attention now was we had a copy of the actual court order allowing it.

This was after in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied through his teeth to a Congressional committee about this. He was asked directly if the NSA collected any sort of data on Americans and he said “No, sir.” He later claimed first that he gave the "least untruthful" answer and even later that he misunderstood the question. Unfortunately, no one thought to ask him just what part of the question he didn't understand.

He wasn't alone: In June, the Washington Post reported that, quoting,

details that have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously classified NSA documents indicate that public assertions about these programs by senior US officials have also often been misleading, erroneous or simply false.

Among those doing the what is politely called "misleading" was the Misleader-in-Chief, Barack Obama, who said in a television interview in June that oversight of the surveillance programs was “transparent” because of the involvement of the FISC, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a special court set up under FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He claimed the existence of this court makes the whole process "transparent" even though that court only hears from government officials, virtually ever denies a government request for spying approval, and its sessions and decisions are both secret.

Around that same time, we learned that it wasn't just our phone records, it was our internet use that was being spied on. The NSA and the FBI, it developed, are tapping into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs. This is the program named PRISM.

We learned that the FISA court, the secret court that Barack Obama bizarrely insisted made everything so "transparent," had signed off on broad government requests to allow the NSA to make use of information collected without a warrant from domestic US communications so long as that info was collected "inadvertently."

Such data could be kept and used if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity. Note first that the very act of encrypting your personal information because a basis for suspicion - and after that ask yourself how, if, as the NSA claims, it "cannot" access the content of your messages without a warrant, it knows if such messages contain "usable intelligence."

We also learned at the same time that, as the The Guardian, a UK newspaper, put it,

discretion as to who is actually targeted under the NSA's foreign surveillance powers lies directly with its own analysts, without recourse to courts or superiors.

They are supposed to decide if you are outside the US and so subject to NSA surveillance based on "the totality of the circumstances based on the information available with respect to that person." What this means, though, is that if they don't specifically know where you are, analysts are free to presume you're overseas.

Put another way, the standard for deciding that you are a foreign suspect outside the United States and so can be legally spied on, rather than inside the US where such warrantless spying is flatly illegal, is "51% confidence." Fifty-one percent - that’s your level of protection against being improperly spied on.
And to add a real element of Dada to this, if it later appears that you are in fact located inside the US, analysts are permitted to read your emails or listen to your phone calls to see if that's true. That is, "We're going to read your emails and listen to your calls in order to see if we should be reading your emails and listening to your calls." Look at all we do for you!

Next, we learned that for the first two years of his administration, the Obama White House continued an NSA program collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans. This included the authority to "analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States." This bulk collection of emails was entirely separate from the PRISM program.

It was supposedly shut down in 2011 because, according to Sen. Ron Wyden, intelligence officials couldn't showit did any good.

But instead of being shut down, it may simply have been renamed or somewhat redesigned, because documents showed that the NSA still collects and analyzes large quantities of Americans' online data. In fact, in December 2012, the Special Source Operations directorate within the NSA announced what it described as a new capability to allow it to collect far more internet traffic and data than ever before. More than 75% of all internet traffic in the US passes through an NSA filter and more than half of that can be stored in NSA's own repositories.

Sources:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/misinformation-on-classified-nsa-programs-includes-statements-by-senior-us-officials/2013/06/30/7b5103a2-e028-11e2-b2d4-ea6d8f477a01_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/misinformation-on-classified-nsa-programs-includes-statements-by-senior-us-officials/2013/06/30/7b5103a2-e028-11e2-b2d4-ea6d8f477a01_story_1.html
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jun/21/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-foreign-intelligence-surveillanc/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/19/fisa-court-approves-surveillance_n_3625610.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/27/nsa-data-mining-authorised-obama
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/07/02/wyden-and-udall-as-with-torture-intelligence-committee-lies-about-efficacy/
http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-udall-statement-on-the-disclosure-of-bulk-email-records-collection-program
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/27/nsa-online-metadata-collection